This week in Rails: DateTime vs Time, summer student projects and more!

Posted by marcelmorgan, June 6, 2015 @ 12:24 am in News

Hello everyone!

This is Marcel making my ‘initial commit’ with awesome help from Kasper, your friendly ghost editor. Ten minutes from the lovely Jamaican shores, here are the headlines from This Week in Rails.

This week’s Rails Contributors

56 people helped make Rails even more awesome this week.

When should you use DateTime?

Ever wondered what is the difference between DateTime and Time? Checkout this enlightening gist on when you would use each which also landed in the ruby documentation.

Google Summer of Code – Web Console

Follow one of our Google Summer of Code student Hiroyuki on his thoughts, experiments and progress with the web-console browser extension project.

Rails Girls Summer of Code

Meet the 16 official teams that will be participating in the 2015 Rails Girls Summer of Code. We wish them the best of luck.

New Stuff

Custom configurations can be required

Sometimes there’s a configuration your app simply needs to function. Now that important client secret can raise if it hasn’t been set. Just go out with a bang: Rails.application.kitty_litter_supreme.client_secret!

Action Mailer queue name is configurable

Currently all mails sent with deliver_later are put in the mailers queue. This patch keeps that default but allows the queue name to be configured globally via config.action_mailer.deliver_later_queue_name. See also related documentation commit.

Improved

Use inline Gemfile when reporting bugs

No longer do you need to write a physical Gemfile when submitting bug reports, as Bundler 1.10.3 now supports inline gems. Of note, when an inline Gemfile is used, bundle exec is not supported.

Use block variable instead of global

As it turns out using a block variable instead of a “magic” global variable is not only faster but easier to read.

Enumerable#pluck supports multiple attributes

This allows easier integration with Active Record, such that ActiveRecord::Base#pluck will now use Enumerable#pluck if the relation is loaded, without needing to hit the database.

Deprecated

Remove assert_template and assigns()

In order to discourage ties in the controller tests to the internal structure of how your views are organized, assigns and assert_template have both been removed and extracted to the gem rails-controller-testing.

Fixed

Apply Active Record suppression to all saves

Active Record’s suppress is now being applied to non-bang save and update methods. It was also missing from create_* methods provided by singular associations. See gist for more details.

That’s a wrap

That’s all for This week in Rails. As always, there are many more changes than we have room to cover here, but feel free to check them out yourself!

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